One for ESCOM

This week, like the rest of the COM community I had some exam. One of the implications of writing an exam was that I had to ration my movie and music consumption to make time for studies. Reasonable. What I was thinking was that I would have time to compensate on that when I go for the holidays (I know some are frowning because they expect me to be breading some Robert Kiyosaki book). Just for the relaxation. Those were the very thoughts that made me leave for home barely two hours after getting out of an exam room. Sounds like a reasonable plan to make, but it took me less than a minute (into my arrival at home) to realize that I made the right plan in the wrong country.

Those who know me have always known me as a Zomba boy, but I just recently moved from the former capital to the commercial capital. Well. Not the heart of it, but rather some peripheral part. I am now based in Lunzu. Fair town, if you think of it. Big enough not to be boring and small enough to be navigable. If you know what I mean.

I am told that my parents were staying here when I was born. Can't remember much from that time because its too far back, and as such I know very little about this town. Save for the little I hear from half baked local songs about the night life here of course. The plan, therefore, was to come here, lock myself up and watch my movies, as already said. Of course I do have friends here, but some are working and... Well, let's just say are unpredictable. When I arrived, the town was unusually silent. Well. I obviously knew that something had gone wrong and ESCOM had done their usual thing.

That was the moment I had a reality check and welcomed myself to "Malawi Proper". Ever since I joined college, this whole thing of getting used to power outages left me because I can only count 6 of those in my 5 years of college. Now there I was, into one and when I asked around, people told me that I should not be worried because "when the power goes out like that" it comes back at around 8 pm. Sounded like they were okay with it, from the way they said it. I am not sure whether it is that they don't use the power that much or that they have just gotten used to it that it has become a normal thing. Either way, something is seriously wrong and it needs to be addressed promptly.

The body responsible for providing power to us is not doing a good job and that is a well known fact. They had the slogan "power all day everyday" but incompetence forced them to prefix it with the word "towards". That was justified and if they are thinking in the same lines, they might as well think of changing it. The reason is simply that there has not been a single improvement and worse still these power outages have been getting worse by the day which renders the word "towards" an overambitious addition.

I understand there is a boss at ESCOM. Possibly there is a board governing it and as a parastatal there is some sort of government involvement in the operations. This is what makes me puzzled as to why there is gross regression in the service provision for which no one has been "sorted out". Someone is being irresponsible here.

From my basic understanding, ESCOM is supposed to be a combination of the technical staff (electrical engineers) and management along with other support stuff. From the look of things, it is only the support part working while the technical people are not, in shallow terms. In other words, the management are working on a lot of "improvements" like hiking the rates of the power while the technicians haven't worked on improving the power with a single megawatt or whatever the unit is.

My question? Where is the ministry of energy (trying to avoid the minister, there)?

Can't talk about the minister's boss, because he recently told us to bear with ESCOM. Yes. The very man who talks of bringing investors in the country. One would if the investors would bear with ESCOM too.

Some Indian business tycoon once told me some reasons for the failure of our parastatals. He said that the first one was lack of political will and the other was that they are being run by lazy Malawians. Maybe we should magufulify ESCOM and fire some few guys (FIRE and not transfer to another parastatal). Or maybe its the issue of leadership which we can't do anything about... At least in the next 10 years (I don't see any good leader rising up that soon).

If you think of it, it might be our dependence on ESCOM that has left us this disappointed and writing about power in our social media and blogs. Perhaps we needed some alternatives, in the name of private companies that could provide us with power. It would probably be more expensive, but at least we would have it for at least 20 hours if not 24 of the day. Someone needs to fill the paperwork for that one.

All in all, I think our cooperation has failed us big time. In my new home, I have seen people adapting and barbershops are still open, on power from generators. I should probably just get my own "gen set" instead of complaining, but should we be struggling to have something as basic as electricity when we pay good money for it? Gadaffi used to give that to his citizens for free for goodness sake.

Blantyre Water Board. I also found dry taps here. I am watching you.

Lesson? Brace yourselves. You might not have the electricity for dancing to Great Angels Choir and Skelewu on New Year's Day. Prepare for it and don't complain because I have warned you, not in the capacity of a prophet, but someone who knows a thing probability.